Voltaire's Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet:A New Translation

Preface: Voltaire and Islam

Malise Ruthven

Until recently, it was generally considered that
Islam, the youngest of the great world religions, was born “not amidst the
mystery which cradles the origin of other religions, but rather in the full
light of history,” as Ernest Renan, the French scholar of Middle East civilizations,
put it in 1883.[i]Most
textbooks and popular biographies still take Renan’s line: Islam originated
among the tribal Arabs of the Hijaz (the coastal region of western Arabia that
includes both Mecca and Medina) who heeded the divine messages transmitted by
the Prophet Muhammad as contained in the holy text of the Quran.

The traditional view of Muhammad’s life, conveyed by
the vast majority of biographies, runs as follows. Muhammad began preaching
around 510 CE in his native Mecca, the site of an ancient shrine to which Arabs
made regular pilgrimages.His
attacks on the local gods brought him into conflict with the city’s rulers, and
in 622 CE, he and his band of followers migrated to the neighbouring settlement
of Yathrib—later known as Medina, the Prophet’s “city”—where he
formed an alliance with local tribes, three of which adhered to Jewish rites.
After a series of raids and battles (to which there are allusions in the Quran
but no descriptions), he overcame the Meccan polytheists and restored the shrine
at Mecca to the true worship of the God of Abraham. The recalcitrant Jews who
refused to accept his message were expelled from Medina—and in one
instance massacred for allegedly treacherous dealings with Muhammad’s Meccan enemies.

Modern scholars, taking their view from more than a
century of biblical criticism, have begun to cast doubt on the traditional
narrative. The first written accounts of Muhammad’s life were forged out of a
vast body of stories known as Hadiths
(“traditions” or reports), passed down orally by the generations that followed
him.The earliest biography, by
Ibn Hisham, who died in 833 CE, contains parts of the missing work of an
earlier scholar, Ibn Ishaq, who is thought to have lived between 707 and 767 CE.By that time the Muslim armies had long
defeated the Persian Empire, wrested control of Palestine, Syria, and Egypt
from the heirs of Constantine and Justinian, and established a fragile imperium
that stretched from Iberia to the Indus Valley. The Arabian prophet, whose exemplary
life and preaching are supposed to have inspired this remarkable series of
conquests was already famous, and his biography came fully supplied with the
supernatural tropes—angelic visitations and miracles—that adorn the
lives of holy persons in almost every human culture.

There are clearly problems with this biography to
which modern scholars are drawing increasing attention. The dating of the first
written narrative to at least a century after Muhammad’s putative death in 632
CE may be contrasted with that of Mark’s gospel,considered by most Bible scholars to be the earliest of the
three synoptic gospels and to have been written up to four decades after the
crucifixion of Jesus. The story of
Jesus contained in the synoptic gospels has long been subjected to the rigors
of formal criticism, with scholars such as Rudolph Bultmann claiming that
almost nothing can be known about the life and personality of Jesus, as
distinct from the message of the early Christian community, which for the most
part the Church freely attributed to Jesus.[ii]Despite its greater antiquity, the Christian narrative appears to have
had a shorter oral transmission time than its Muslim counterpart. Furthermore,
while there are allusions to Jesus in the writings of Josephus and Pliny that
provide some cross-referencing for the events described in the Gospels, the
Muslim accounts have no such historical anchoring: they are almost entirely
“insider narratives” composed in the spirit of piety.Some verses from the Quran, including references to
Muhammad, are inscribed on the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, dating from 692
CE. Yet even these have been questioned as sources for the life of Muhammad.
The word “muhammad,” written in Arabic script without an initial capital
letter, can be treated as a passive participle meaning “the praised one.” At
least one scholar, drawing on numismatic and archaeological evidence, suggests
that the inscriptions actually refer to Jesus.[iii]

The text of the Quran, the “discourse” or “recitation”
that is said to contain the exact words dictated by God to Muhammad through the
Angel Gabriel, is supposed to have been fixed by Uthman (R. 644-656), the third
caliph, or successor to Muhammad’s worldly power. It may have provided some
clues to Muhammad’s biography—but they are only clues. The text is not
arranged chronologically, and its style is highly allusive and elliptical.
There are few extended narratives: the Quran’s auditors were evidently familiar
with the materials in its discourses. There are references to stories contained
in the Hebrew Bible and the Midrash (biblical commentaries), allusions to the
Jesus narratives in the Gospels, including Gnostic versions expurgated from the
official canon, and stories about Arabian prophets and sages who do not feature
in the Judeo-Christian repertoire. The earliest Muslim exegetes—many of
whom were Persian converts to Islam and far removed culturally from Muhammad’s
supposed Bedouin milieu in western Arabia—were inspired to reconstruct
the Prophet’s biography in order to understand the holy text, in particular,
allusions to events in the Prophet’s life or “occasions of revelation.” There
is a sense in which the Quran’s textual history conforms to Muslim piety: far
from Muhammad being its “author,” the Quran, as the unmediated Word of God, is
in a literary-historical sense the “author” of Muhammad.

Scholars who have examined Greek, Armenian, Aramaic,
and Hebrew sources alongside the earliest Arabic texts of the Quran and the hadiths have advanced a variety of
alternatives to the conventional narrative. The American linguist, John
Wansbrough, who taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London,
suggested that Islam, rather than originating in the arid deserts surrounding
Mecca and Medina, arose much further north in a sectarian milieu of Christians
and Judaized Arabs in the lands of the Fertile Crescent.[iv]
More recently, in Muhammad and the
Believers (2010), Fred Donner, doyen of American Islamic scholars, has
argued that Islam began in the same region as part of an ecumenical movement of
monotheists living in the daily expectation of End Times.[v]This revisionist view has recently been given a more popular currency by
a British classical author, Tom Holland, in his book In the Shadow of the Sword (2012).

Following in Wansbrough’s wake, Holland suggests that
Islam was born, not in the deserts of Arabia, but in the borders of
Syria-Palestine, a region that had long been devastated by plagues and
wars—the usual precursors of apocalyptic scenarios and millennial hopes.
Muhammad’s Qurayshite enemies may not have been Meccans but Arab tribes that
had grown rich on Roman-Byzantine patronage. Far from being illiterate (as the
traditional biographies claim, with a view to emphasizing the Quran’s
miraculous character), Muhammad was a sophisticated man who “laid claim to
traditions of divine inspiration that were immeasurably venerable,” knowing
full well what he was about.

The religion he founded began as a classic millennial
cult comprising Jews, Christians, and Arabs driven by an apocalyptic belief in
the end of the world, with Jerusalem as its original focus. The early caliphs
of Islam, who saw themselves as God’s vice-regents, were both heirs and
beneficiaries of the same millennial expectations—long entrenched in the
region’s culture—that surface in the biblical books of Daniel and
Revelation, as well as in the Dead Sea Scrolls. According to this view, the
purely Arabian provenance attributed to Islam and its prophet were later
inventions by pious scholars who tried to curb the power of the caliphs by
using the memory of Muhammad, with its by now well-established iconic moral
authority.

None of the revisionist discourse, which has been
strongly contested by some scholars working on the earliest manuscript sources,
would have been known to Voltaire.As a religious iconoclast he would, no doubt, have relished the debate
that has recently opened up over Islamic origins. As a dramatist, however, he
explicitly rejected any requirement for historical accuracy. As xxxxxxxxx
points out in the introduction to her elegant prose translation, the character
of Mahomet is a fiction created for dramatic effect, not an attempt to portray
a real historical actor. “Where would Virgil and Homer be if people had
bothered them about the details?” Voltaire asks. The same question is currently
being asked of Shakespeare’s Richard III, whose skeletal remains were recently
discovered under a parking lot in the English city of Leicester. Shakespeare’s
murderous villain, crook-backed and leering, dragging his misshapen body round
the historical stage, bears little relationship to the somewhat prudish devotee
of St. Anthony the Hermit, patron of those who struggle against the sins of the
flesh, who is documented in the historical record.[vi]
Just as Shakespeare’s character was invented to appease the Tudors who had
defeated Richard on the field of Bosworth, Voltaire’s Mahomet was invented to
annoy the religious.

The great philosophe
was clearly familiar with the more positive details of the Prophet’s life as
contained in the “Preliminary Discourse” attached to Sale’s English translation
of the Quran (1734), and in two French biographies of Muhammad, Henri de
Boulainvillier’s Vie de Mahomed (1730),
and Jean Gagnier’s La Vie de Mahomet
traduite et compilée de l’Alcoran (1732).[vii]As a passionate anti-cleric, however, he simply plundered these sources
and distorted them for his wider purpose, which was to attack the hypocritical
religiosity he saw as underpinning France’s ancien
régime.Richard Holmes quotes
from one of his many ill-tempered diatribes against priests of every
denomination who “rise from an incestuous bed, manufacture a hundred versions
of God, then eat and drink God, then piss and shit God.”[viii]
The intellectual forebear of such “enlightenment fundamentalists” as Richard
Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, Voltaire viewed Muhammad initially
through anti-Christian and, specifically, anti-Catholic spectacles.

Depicted as an impostor and a lecherous villain, Voltaire’s
Mahomet is singularly lacking in redeeming features. Far from having the
qualities that grace the heroes of classical tragedy, he appears as a scheming,
ambitious, and wicked tyrant, an impostor motivated by lust. The remorse he
exhibits at the end of the play—added, it has been suggested, for “public
edification”—is, in Ahmad Gunny’s view, “at best a passing impression and
not a permanent trait of character.”[ix] Some
critics have seen Mahomet as being more of a tract than a play—an attack
on religion generally, and in particularthe fatalism that Voltaire and many of his contemporaries associated
with Islam. Discerning critics saw it as a coded attack on the Catholic Church,
cleverly disguised as a polemic against its principle religious enemy. Lord
Chesterfield thought that under the guise of Muhammad, Voltaire was really
attacking Christ, and was surprised that this was not noticed at the time of
its first performance in Lille (1741). Chesterfield met a good Catholic there
“whose zeal surpassed his insight, who was extremely edified by the way in
which this imposter and enemy of Christianity had been depicted.”[x]
One can easily imagine Voltaire smiling with his tight-lipped grin of “a maimed
monkey” (un singe estropié), as he
himself described it.[xi] How
satisfying to have stimulated a bigoted response from a play whose original
title page reads Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet
le prophète, tragédie.

Voltaire’s attack on fanaticism in Mahomet may have been pitched at the
supposed enemy of Christianity, but there was a more immediate polemical
purpose in his distortion of the Muhammad story. In his life of the Prophet,
Boulainvillier follows Ibn Hisham and subsequent chroniclers, including the
Syrian Abu al-Fida al-Hamawi (1273-1331), from whom Boulainvillier drew his
narrative, who relates that Abu Sufyan, leader of the Qurayshites, inspired by
the Prophet’s magnanimity, eventually converts to Islam. In Voltaire’s play,
however, the Abu Sufyan character (who is called Zopire, possibly after a
Persian who features in Herodotus’s Histories
as helping Darius trick his way into Babylon)[xii]is murdered for failing to
embrace Islam. Voltaire’s treatment not only blackens Muhammad’s character, but
sabotages the image of the charismatic visionary who defeated his enemies by
force of the Quran’s eloquence as much as by his prowess in battle. A similar
purpose is evident from his treatment of Palmira, who resists Mahomet’s
advances and kills herself rather than succumbing to them. The model for
Palmira in Muhammad’s biography is Zainab bint Jahsh, ex-wife of Muhammad’s
adopted son Zaid ibn Haritha, who Muhammad married—correctly, in accordance
with Islamic practice—after she
had been divorced from her husband. Instead of embracing the more sympathetic
image of Muhammad depicted by Boulainvillier and Sale, Voltaire defaults to an
older vision of Islam as a “religion preached by the sword and violence without
any element of persuasion.”[xiii] Doubtless
it was this wholly negative depiction of the Prophet that secured papal
approval for the play by Benedict XIV—an anti-Jansenist pope who would
have seen the attack on Muhammad as a critique of the influential Jansenist
party in France. A leading figure of this puritanical Catholic movement was the
procurator Joly de Fleury, who was responsible for withdrawing the play after
its successful Paris debut in 1742.[xiv]

Voltaire, however, was far from being uniformly hostile
to Islam. In a private letter to Frederick of Prussia, he acknowledged that he
had made Muhammad worse than he was: “Mahomet did not exactly weave the type of
treason that forms the subject of this tragedy.”[xv]His earlier play Zaïre, set in
Jerusalem at the time of the Crusades, presents the Muslim religion more
pragmatically. The heroine Zaïre, whose husband, the sultan Orosmane,
tragically mistakes her encounter with her lost brother, a Christian, for
sexual infidelity, offers a rather more tolerant view:

My heart doesn’t know itself …Custom and law moulded my
earliest years
to the happy Muslim religion. I see only too clearly: the training that we are
given as children shapes our feelings, our mores, our belief. On the banks of the Ganges, I
would have been a slave to false gods; in Paris, a Christian; in this place, a
Muslim.[xvi]

Voltaire’s subsequent essay, De l’Alcoran et de Mahomet (1748), maintains his view that Muhammad
was an impostor who exploited beliefs in the supernatural while having no such
supernatural help himself. In this respect, he regarded Islam as inferior to
the Chinese religion because—unlike Muhammad— Confucius depended neither
on revelation, nor on lies, nor on the sword for his teachings, but only on
reason. However, in disputing the claim that Muhammad was illiterate—a
theme he took up in Chapter VI of the Essai
sur les moeurs—Voltaire also makes some positive comments about the
founder of Islam:

“How can one imagine that a man who had been a merchant,
poet, legislator and sovereign was unable to write his name? If his book is
unsuitable for our times and for ourselves, it was truly good for his contemporaries.His religion was even better. We should
recognise that he virtually rescued the whole of Asia from idolatry. He taught
the unity of God and forcefully denounced anyone claiming that God has
partners. He banned the usurious exploitation of strangers, and enjoined the
giving of alms. Prayer is an absolute requirement; acceptance of eternal
decrees animates all. It is hardly surprising that a religion so simple and
wise, taught by a man who was always victorious in the field took power in much
of the world. In actuality the Muslims made as many converts by the word as by
the sword, including Indians and many Negroes. Even the Turkish conquerors submitted
themselves to Islam.”[xvii]

Voltaire’s articles in the Mercure de France in 1745 proceed on similar lines. In one of them
he disposes of the myth that the Muslim conquerors of Spain were wild monsters
whose only superiority lay in force. While acknowledging the cruelty that
always accompanies conquests, he points out that the Moors were not without
humanity, and that in all their provinces they tolerated Christians. Despite
the asymmetrical Islamic approach towards mixed marriages (whereby a Christian
man would be executed for marrying a Muslim woman unless he converted to Islam),
the Muslims were merciful conquerors, leaving the vanquished their property,
laws, and religion. Hence, Spaniards who had hitherto followed Catholicism were
not reluctant to leave it, becoming Mozarabs instead of Visigoths.[xviii]Turning his attention eastward, he likewise commends the Turks for their
tolerance. Whereas no Christian nation allows the Turks to build a mosque on
its soil, the Turks allow the Greeks to have their churches in lands under
their control, and he commends the way that, in their European domains, they
have retained “Asian” traditions, such as building caravanserais for
travellers, or schools and hospitals attached to mosques.[xix]

In his excursion into early Islamic history in Chapter
VI of the Essai sur les moeurs,
Voltaire commends the Caliph Umar for allowing Jews and Christians full liberty
of conscience following the capture of Jerusalem. Interestingly, in discussing
the succession to Muhammad he takes the Shi‘ite view: that the Prophet
designated his cousin and son-in-law Ali as his Caliph, or successor.[xx]As Voltaire’s knowledge of Islam deepened, he clearly became better disposed
towards the faith. In the Essai,for example, he dwells on the
contrasting historical trajectories of Christianity and Islam. From being a
religion initially spread by arms, Islam became increasingly tolerant, whereas
Christianity, after starting out from a “meek and humble” stance, became ever
more barbaric and intolerant. The contrast is underlined in the Examen de Milord Bolingbroke (1766), where it
is Christianity that fails the test of reason. Belief in an all-powerful God,
says Voltaire, is the only Muslim dogma: without the coda proclaimed in the shahada (the Islamic declaration of
faith) that Muhammad is rasul Allah
(the Messenger of God), Islam could have been every bit as “pure and beautiful”
as the Chinese religion.[xxi] There is
an implicit endorsement of this view in the final chapters of Voltaire’s
masterpiece Candide (1762). After
their bizarre and traumatic adventures in Europe and Latin America, it is in
Muslim Turkey that Candide and his companions find the peace of mind where they
may “cultivate their garden.”

Note: Since there is virtually no connection between Voltaire’s “Mahomet”
and the prophet of Islamic tradition, I have adopted Voltaire’s spelling when
referring to this character and used the conventional spelling “Muhammad” when
referring to the Prophet.

[i] Cited
in Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the
Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire (New York:
Doubleday, 2012), 34.

[iii] Volker
Popp, “The Early History of Islam, Following Inscriptional and Numismatic Testimony,” in The Hidden Origins of Islam: New Research
into Its Early History, ed. Karl-Heinz Ohlig and Gerd R. Puin (Amherst:
Prometheus Books, 2010), 12-124: 52 and passim.